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Mozilla Links Newsletter - International Issue 1 - April 8, 2004

This issue introduces Mozilla Community, a new section for people to share their stories and thoughts. Here, we have three stories from Europe and Asia. As usual, we also have more tips and tricks to help users browse international sites more efficiently.

In this special international edition, we pay tribute to our
international contributors and developers who make Mozilla one
of the most popular software worldwide.

It is only April, and already this is an exciting year for all
of us. Mozilla Europe, a non-profit organization aiming at promoting
Mozilla to users and enterprises, was launched on Feburary 17th. In
addition, French community Geckozone site has reopened and firefox.pl
was launched. For the newsletter, we added five new languages this
year alone--Czech, Chinese, German, Japanese, and Russian. The Japan
community will be hosting Mozilla dot Party 5.0 this month. As the
year goes on, we hope to see more content for international users.

This issue introduces Mozilla Community, a new section for people to
share their stories and thoughts. Here, we have three stories from
Europe and Asia. As usual, we also have more tips and tricks to help
users browse international sites more efficiently.

In issue 3, we talked about bookmarklets. In case you missed the
issue, here's a recap. Bookmarklets are JavaScript code that can
be added to your bookmarks or personal toolbar. They can perform
many useful functions, and you can find a big bookmarklets library
at: http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/

Mozilla 1.6 introduced a translation tool (which by default uses
Google translation engine). Some international users may find this
lacking. For example, a Chinese user may find a need for a
English-Chinese translation function in addition to a function for
converting text between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese.
If you need to use more than one translation service, then you can
put additional functions as bookmarklets on your personal toolbar.

http://mozilla.gunnars.net/bookmarklets/ lists many useful
bookmarklets for translation. To "add" a translation tool, drag the
link to the Personal Toolbar or a folder in the Personal Toolbar. To
activate translation on your current page, simply click on the
translation bookmarklet.

If you surf non-English sites, you will encounter Web addresses with
non-English characters in them. By default, Mozilla will "escape" these
characters and show them as something like %e3%82%b3%e3 . This makes
surfing difficult because you cannot see what exactly the Location Bar
is showing. You can turn off this feature:

- Type "about:config" in the Location Bar
- In the filter box, type "network.standard-url.escape-utf8"
- Double click the setting and set the value to "false"

****

Need more tips? Try the TipBar Extension to get the Tip of the Day in
Mozilla Firefox. Grab it at http://tipbar.mozdev.org

Mozilla Europe takes the European Mozilla community efforts to the
natural next level. The European community started back in 2000 with
the first European Mozilla Developers' day, which was organized by
Axel Hecht (Mozilla Europe Board Member) and SESA. The developer day
was held in the tradition of those organized by Netscape in the USA.
The eu.mozdev.org project was created to deliver the technical
resources like web space and mailing lists to organize meetings in
Europe as well as archiving presentations of the past. In terms of
localization, Robert Kaiser (working on this topic from Austria)
started to push the envelope, too.

Regarding documentation, the MozFR project was started on Mozdev in
order to translate the Mozilla 1.0 documentation in French. Some of us
felt that we needed to go further, but none of us had both the time
and capabilities to lead such a project. In 2003, AOL decided to stop
supporting the Mozilla development effort, so the Mozilla project went
into the hands of the newly founded Mozilla Foundation. The lay-offs
included the European Netscape employees working on Mozilla and while
the Mozilla Association was able to take over some of the projects
management, the need for a European presence became even more
apparent. The foundation of Mozilla Europe in early 2004 was the next
logical step, driven by Tristan Nitot and Peter Van der Beken.

We approached the Mozilla Foundation to see how we could cooperate,
worked with lawyers to create a non-profit legal structure, and after
a good deal of thinking and paperwork, we were almost done. The first
project of the newly born community was to create the
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/ Website, available in four languages to
start (English, French, German and Spanish), and we plan to add more
languages soon. We are also looking to improve two domains that are
very important for Mozilla's success in Europe: localization (how we
can facilitate the incredible work already done by local communities)
and enterprise deployment.

Membership fees, donations and funds raised by Mozilla Europe will be
spent on buying a server, hosting and bandwidth, among other things.
For this, we have set up a Web page where you can support the Mozilla
Europe initiative: http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/contribute/ .

****

mozilla.party.jp 5.0
--------------------

Mozilla-gumi, one of the largest Mozilla user groups in Japan, is
organizing an annual conference on April 18. This year's theme is Open
Source Desktop, including OpenOffice.org and KNOPPIX. The organizer is
also inviting a prominent researcher on open source movements, Dr.
Chihiro Suematsu, assistant professor of Kyoto University.

Issues to be discussed are: the challenges for open source projects to
attract wider users; individual/common problems experienced by open
source projects; and how to foster more active exchange among open
source communities.

The main panel sessions consist of:

* Mozilla Foundation session: video message (or actual speech of a
guest speaker) from a member of Mozilla Foundation

I am Bob Chao, a student in Taiwan. Currently, I am involved in
translating articles on Mozilla and promoting Mozilla to Chinese users.
Here I would like to share my experience with promoting Mozilla.

Promotion

Starting with Mozilla 0.9, I have been promoting Mozilla in our school
department. Because it was a one-man project, the method was somewhat
passive: with each new version I would translate the What's New file
and post it to our department's BBS; I would also mention news about
Mozilla in my personal site. In addition, I recommended Mozilla in
community high school workshops. My audience was students interested
in computers, so the campaign was focused on "technology" and "
standard". Although some were willing to switch to Mozilla, most would
rather use Internet Explorer already available on their computers.
Moreover, a high percentage of Taiwan students use BBS, thus software
vendors release widely popluar IE-based browser with integrated telnet
support. Due to these factors, my effort made little progress.

My campaign only took off due to Phoenix (former name of Firefox).
piap, the Chinese Traditional Localization project leader, began
localizing Phoenix starting from 0.2. Begining with 0.5, I have been
advocating it along with Mozilla. Unlike in my previous effort, the
new focus is on "small size" and "speed"; that attracts users who want
to try new things. Because of various changes meeting users' needs,
there are more and more converts. As of March 12, 13% of students in
my department were using Mozilla or Firefox. Speed, simplicity, and a
wide variety of extensions are the top attractions.

An interesting fact: in Taiwan, most Mozilla advocates have their own
Blog. Their posts on their own experience with Mozilla are much more
appealing to users than general promotional articles.

Translation

With the release of Firefox 0.7, I started translating the famed "Why"
article to promote this fantastic program. Another fan, contagious,
was one step early, so I helped him with editing and then advertise on
my Blog, Mozilla@Taiwan forum, etc. Based on suggestions of community
members, I then translated Firefox Product Page, Roadmap, Developer
Page, FAQ, etc. I received a lot of suggestions and support from
community peers, and the task was quite smooth. On Daniel Wang's
suggestion, the Mozilla@Taiwan forum added a new discussion group for
documentation and translation, thus allowing for translations of some
terms to be standardized and once-scattered documents to be more
centralized. After end-user documents, my focus now is on Web standard
documentation. In the Chinese geography the concept of "standard"
needs improving. To the common user complaint of "I cannot see this
page in Mozilla!", I believe that "proper education of web developers"
is the real solution.

As of now, we put our finished translation in Mozilla@Taiwan forum or
Wiki for commenting, editing, and publicizing. This is similar to
Bugzilla, though we currently don't need aid from such large database
system.

Our translation effort isn't fast, and more people should be involved.
If you know some Chinese and English, then come join us!

The independent status reports include news and updates from
Mozilla application and extension projects hosted on mozdev.org
and elsewhere in the Mozilla community.

Here are updates from just some of the many International projects
active in the Mozilla community. The report was posted on April 8,
2004. For more projects, refer to the 'Language' category in the
mozdev project listings.
http://www.mozdev.org/categories/language.html

l10nzilla, software to help in Mozilla based apps L10N.
l10nzilla is web based tool to aid in creating and maintaining
localisations of Mozilla based applications. It is a combination of
a MySQL database for storing translations with a PHP based front end
for editing and a Java based command line program for importing/
exporting translations and generating JAR files for inclusion in the
language packs.

Some Notable Highlights include:
- stores translations from many Mozilla/XUL applications and/or
versions
- supports web based translation by many translators
- translates JAR files based on translations stored in database
- imports/exports translations as HTML
- imports/exports translations as po files (alpha code)
- maintains statistics on translations
- supports UTF-8
Please get in touch if you would like to use L10NZilla in your Mozilla
apps localisation.
http://l10nzilla.mozdev.org/

Mycroft, now at 1100+ Search Plug-ins for Mozilla and Firefox.
We are providing over 1100 search plug-ins, in a total of 34 languages
covering 51 countries. Last month, we've processed over 100 requests
and received over 100 contributions.
For Localizers: get in touch via the mailing list. We can tell you what
plug-ins are popular for your country. This way, you can ship a
localized version of Mozilla or Firefox with a set of useful search
plug-ins.
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/http://mycroft.mozdev.org/mozdev-intl.html

kairo project, Robert Kaiser's collected works.
The 'kairo' project at mozdev is mainly for collectiong smaller pieces
of work done by me. Currently, the slides of my talks about L10n
topics at FOSDEM 2002-2004 are up there. I plan to eventually add some
scripts for XPI packaging and installing in the future, raw versions
of those scripts (as I use them for providing Mozilla German XPIs) are
available at my Mozilla L10n resources site (scripts/ and xpi/
directories), but I want to add OSS licenses, overhaul the scripts and
comment their use before moving them to mozdev.
http://kairo.mozdev.org/http://resources.kairo.at/mozilla/l10n/

l10ntools, localization tools for Mozilla.
The l10ntools project has now closed and has been moved to
sourceforge. Our tools enable translation of mozilla using PO (gettext)
files and the use of the variety of PO-editors there are (e.g. kbabel,
POedit, etc). So far at least the South African, Irish and Brazilian
Portugese teams are using these tools.
http://translate.sourceforge.net/

Gaeilge, Mozilla Localisation Resources for the Irish language.
This is the project for the Irish localisation of the Mozilla Firefox
Web browser. We are in the process of translating version 0.8 and hope
to have a finished product in the next few weeks. After this initial
release, we foresee a faster rollout of language packs and builds for
subsequent Firefox releases.
We are utilising MozPOTools, created by the the South African
translation team and hosted at the l10ntools project, which are a
collection of scripts to convert Mozilla resources to gettext .po
format and back.
The Irish localisation team is made up of volunteers from around the
world; please send an email to the project mailing list if you'd be
interested in helping out. We are in particular need of translators.
http://gaeilge.mozdev.org/

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